Kristen Ashley: Three Wishes

Now she was getting over his head. He didn’t think there was such a thing as impossibly handsome. How cheekbones could be powerful, Fazire didn’t know. He was even thinking he might have to look up “virile” in the dictionary Sarah had given him.

“And he has to be hard and cold and maybe a little bit forbidding, a little bit bad with a broken heart I have to mend or one encased in ice I have to melt or better yet… both!”

Fazire thought this was getting a bit ridiculous. It was the most complicated wish he’d ever heard.

But she wasn’t yet finished.

“We have to go through some trials and tribulations. Something to test our love, make it strong and worthy. And… and… he has to be daring and very masculine. Powerful. People must respect him, maybe even fear him. Graceful too and lithe, like a… like a cat! Or a lion. Or something like that.”

She was losing steam and Fazire had to admit he was grateful for it.

“And he has to be a good lover.” Lily shocked Fazire by saying. “The best, so good, he could almost make love to me just by using his eyes.”

Fazire felt himself blush. Perhaps he should have a look at these books she was reading and show them to Becky. Lily was a very sharp girl, sharp as a tack (another one of Sarah’s sayings, although Fazire couldn’t imagine a tack ever being as clever as Lily) but she was too young to be reading about any man making love to her with his eyes. Fazire had never made love, never would, genies just didn’t. But he was pretty certain fourteen year old girls shouldn’t be thinking about it.

Though, he was wrong about that, or at least Becky would tell him that later.

Then Fazire realised she’d stopped talking.

“Is that it?” he asked.

She thought for a bit, clearly not wanting to leave anything out.

Then she nodded.

“Are you sure you want this to be your wish?” Fazire asked.

She looked at him straight in the eye. Hers were sombre and direct.

Then she nodded again.

“Very well,” Fazire said on a sigh.

He opened his mouth to speak but she put her hand out to stall him, resting it on his arm. “Don’t forget that part about him loving me more than anything on earth.”

He lifted his goatee’ed chin in acknowledgement.

“And!” she burst out, squeezing his arm for emphasis, “The part about him thinking I’m beautiful.”

“Lily, you will be beautiful, you already are.”

Her chin quivered and he knew she was about ready to cry.

“Just don’t forget those parts, they’re the most important,” she reminded him, her voice shaky and, Fazire thought, terribly, unforgettably sad.

His hand covered hers on his arm.

“I won’t forget any of it.”

Then Fazire lifted his hand, put it on her head and said softly, “Lily, my lovely, your wish is my command.”

Eight years later, Lily was now twenty-two…

It was, quite simply, the worst time in his entire genie life.

And as Fazire had lived millennia that was saying quite a lot.

He thought the worst was when Sarah slipped away two years ago.

Fazire had never known anyone who’d died and he’d known Sarah for decades. She was his roommate, his protector, his friend.

He’d had a good, long time with Sarah and he was lucky to have it. He knew that.

It didn’t make him miss her any less.

She was kind to him, took care of him even on her teacher’s salary. She kept him fed, clothed, happy and showered him with baseball tickets and suntan lotion. Sarah never, even though it was her right, asked a thing from Fazire in all her years. She just gave and gave and gave.

The first and only human any genie in the entire History of the Genie Race who had been entitled to but hadn’t asked for one single wish.

Sarah, in Genie Land, was a legend as Fazire thought she very well should be.

She’d at least, before she died, seen the outrageous beauty Lily had become, the now well-rounded perfectness that was just simply Lily. Off gallivanting across the world, or at least England where she went to university and then decided to stay. Becoming sophisticated and cosmopolitan but never losing her down-home, Indiana-girl charm and spirit.

Lily’s gold-white hair had changed. It was still golden with strands of white but also, unusually, had strands of strawberry blond as well as copper. And just to make it that bit more interesting, not that it could get much more interesting, here and there were strands of auburn.

She’d been awarded a scholarship to go study at some place called “Oxford” in England after she won some writing competitions, creating magnificent stories that it seemed everyone wanted to read.

Once in England she became more interested in what she called “footpaths” and tramping around in cathedrals and castles and every museum in London (and a fair few shops) and writing more of her wonderful, entertaining stories, than eating. She was busy, busy, busy and the weight just melted off.

Tall, like her mother, father and grandfather before her even though Fazire had only just seen photos of the handsome, slender Jim, Fazire knew he was tall, Lily was curvaceous with a very small waist and a lovely hourglass figure.

She’d matured into her plain face. Her skin was always impeccable but once the baby fat left it, her intelligence and humour fixed it with extraordinary elegance and beauty.

And now, with those miraculous eyes, well…

She was, quite simply, stunning.

Lily was the pride of all of them, Sarah, Becky, Will and Fazire.

And she had absolutely no idea. None whatsoever.

Lily looked in the mirror and saw the old Lily not the beauty she’d become.

So really Fazire had done his job, she definitely had humility and not the barest hint of conceit.

But now Lily looked beaten and he was very certain that this was the worst time in her entire human life as well.

She was sick every morning, he could hear her vomiting in the bathroom and he’d go in just like he did when she was a little girl and had the flu or one of her awful headaches that gave her so much pain she would get violently ill. Then he would stroke her back and hold her long, thick, glorious hair.

Fazire understood why she was ill, she was heartsick at losing her parents so close after her grandmother.

A plane crash. A horrible, hideous plane crash. They didn’t even have the bodies.

One day Becky and Will were in Hawaii for a much needed vacation. They were taking a day trip to another island on a small twin-engine aircraft (this, Fazire could not imagine, a plane, he thought, always needed a lot more than two engines).

The next day, they were gone.

Fazire had had to use the phone to call Lily in England. He knew how to use it, of course, he hadn’t been living like a human for years and not learned how to order a pizza. But it had taken a long time to track her down. She had some job in a shop and bought a rundown house in some seaside town in Somerset called Clevedon for what she called “no money at all” which, Will said, laid testimony to just how rundown it was. A house which she was determined to restore to its full Victorian beauty.

Call after call, she didn’t answer and Fazire finally decided she was not at her ramshackle abode.

She’d graduated from Oxford and declared she could not leave England. She loved it there. Fazire could see why from the pictures she sent home. It looked beautiful.

Nevertheless Fazire hated it. It took away Lily and he wanted her home.

And now she was home, though he would never have wanted her home like this.

After contacting one of her friends who Becky had in her address book, a woman named Maxine, Fazire had eventually found Lily. Maxine said she was staying somewhere in London and gave Fazire the number.